What words would you use to describe the design of this exhibition of Brazilian modernist art? “Chic bombast” perhaps. The biggest room in the main galleries of Burlington House is painted bold yellow with the names of its two featured artists in huge black graphics and, for visitors to sit on, funky curving furniture. But there’s a mismatch between this ostentatious layout and the small canvases lined up on the walls, in greys, greens and browns. This is the kind of exhibition where everything is “trailblazing” and every artist a “pioneer”. But the art completely fails to match that hyperbolic guff.
“Anita Malfatti was a trailblazing artist whose modernist paintings shocked the Brazilian establishment,” claims a huge wall text that’s much bigger than her works. They must have been easily shocked. Malfatti’s paintings that date from the first world war include cubist studies of the nude, fauvist portraits and expressionist landscapes. Before 1914, she had studied art in Germany and her paintings draw on what she saw and learned. They are fine, just not very original or revolutionary.
